Jazz

Every aspect of the music industry has been touched by its transition to digital distribution, and record deals and recording contracts are no exception. Here music attorney Mark Quails breaks down some of the most import questions about contracts for current day musicians.
Guest post by Mark Quail of Landr...

Saxophonist, composer and Toronto native m: Andrew Rathbun has achieved a rare depth of lyricism, authoritative swing and compositional intelligence in nearly 20 years as a recording artist.
Voted as a 'rising star' in this year's Downbeat Critics Poll, he adds to his portfolio of stirring original albums this winter, with the release of Character Study on Steeplechase Records...

All About Jazz is celebrating Dave Brubeck's birthday today!
Brubeck\'s mother studied piano in England and intended to become a concert pianist; at home she taught piano for extra money. Brubeck was not particularly interested in learning by any particular method, but preferred to create his own melodies, and therefore avoided learning to read sheet music. In college Brubeck was nearly expelled when one of his professors discovered that he could not read sheet music... Read more...

On Joe Henderson's 1965 album In 'n Out, the listener enjoyed five giants for the print of one. The tenor saxophonist and trumpeter Kenny Dorham were joined by powerful cookers: pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones were two-thirds of John Coltrane's rhythm section, while bassist Richard Davis had recorded with Eric Dolphy on Out to Lunch (1964). Recorded for Blue Note in April 1964, In 'n Out features three Henderson originals and two by Dorham. This is a perfect album, so it's tough to pick a favorite, but Punjab is up there. Henderson's modal composition is stormy and swings restlessly between bright and dark tones. The music here is a reflection of its times -- lyrically hopeful but fed up with the era's racism and suppression of black identity. The brilliant cover design was by Reid Miles...

As time continues its relentless march onward, a legacy industry like radio must do everything it can to embracing emerging tech and dive headlong into the future.
Guest post by Fred Jacobs of Jacobs Media Strategies
'You have to always be leaning into the future. If you're leaning away from the future, the future is gonna win, every time.' -- Jeff Bezos...

Here Dana Feldman looks at how Los Angeles-based company Create Music Group has been able able to impact the online streaming economy in artists' favor by tracking down $60 million dollars in unclaimed streaming revenue.
By Dana Feldman. This article originally appeared on Forbes.com
In just three years, Los Angeles-based Create Music Group has changed the online music streaming game. What started as a YouTube monetization company, collecting revenue on behalf of artists and labels, now monetizes more than nine billion streams per month. This year alone, CMG is on track to find $45 million for its clients, and in 2019 it's predicted to find an additional $100 million...

As a musician, promoting your music can often seem prohibitively expensive, particularly if you're just getting started out. While this is certainly true in some cases, not every promotional technique has to break the bank, and several of the following ideas are as inexpensive as they are powerful.
Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0...

Galactic has announced that they've purchased the iconic New Orleans nightclub e: Tipitina's. The recently finalized deal, which has been in negotiation for most of the year, will transfer ownership of the music venue and it's associated business to the popular indie funk band.
Galactic is no stranger to Tipitina's and the band has been performing there for more than two decades. The members of Galactic stated that they plan to continue to operate Tipitina's as a music club, hosting both nationally touring acts as well as local favorites...

Uncharted Crossings- The Backstory of the Windrush Generation
Uncharted Crossings may well be m: Grand Union Orchestra's most powerful and politically committed show in its thirty-year history. The music traces the contribution to British culture of the people who came to these shores from the Caribbean from the late forties onwards. In many ways, theirs was just a chapter in a story that had begun five centuries earlier on the slave ships that crossed the Atlantic carrying human cargo to the plantations of North and South America and the Caribbean...

All About Jazz is celebrating Enrico Pieranunzi's birthday today!
Born in Rome in 1949, Enrico Pieranunzi has long been one of the best-known and appreciated personalities on the European jazz scene. Pianist, composer, arranger, he has recorded more than seventy CDs under his own name, ranging from solo piano to trio, and from duet to quintet. He has played in concert and in the studio with Chet Baker, Lee Konitz, Marc Johnson, Joey Baron, Paul Motian, Chris Potter and Charlie Haden... Read more...

Jay Thomas With The Oliver Groenewald Newnet: I Always Knew (Origin)
Thomas, a veteran master of brass and reed instruments, teams with Groenewald, the man he describes in his liner notes as 'the perfect fit for me as an arranger.' With a band that includes ten of the Pacific Northwest's major jazz artists, the two explore the possibilities in a dozen ballads from the past nine decades. In the five years or so that the German-born Groenewald has lived near Seattle on an island in Puget Sound, he and Thomas (pictured right) have developed a personal and artistic relationship whose closeness expresses itself in Thomas's soloing in, through and around Groenewald's writing. On alto, tenor and soprano saxophones as well as trumpet and flugelhorn, Thomas's imagination thrives on the scores fashioned with muscularity and delicacy by Groenewald. He interleaves those contrasting attributes on rarely performed post-bebop pieces like Lee Morgan's 'Yama,' Chick Corea's 'October Ballad,' as well as on modern classics including Duke Ellington's 'Blue Serge,' Tadd Dameron's 'Soultrane' and Billy Strayhorn's 'Ballad For The Very Tired And Very Sad Lotus Eaters.'Groenewald (pictured left) is a member of the Newnet's brass section...

Following my post on Joe Mooney's Wait Till You See Her a week ago, I received a high level of emails from readers who didn't know much about Mooney but loved what they heard. The same was true at Facebook, where there was quite a lot of traffic in favor of the lounge singer-organist-accordionist. [Photo above of Joe Mooney and his accordion with Decca's Milt Gabler, rear, and Morty Palitz in December 1946, by William P. Gottlieb...

Driving fans to an artist's site only to redirect them elsewhere to purchase a download or t-shirt means lost revenue and a chance to capture valuable fan and marketing data. The reams of a growing number of major and indie artists are building their own.
Guest post from Single
You drive traffic to your website. Why do you send fans elsewhere to download your music? Not only are you giving DSP's a cut of your revenue, you're also missing out on data that accompanies the sale. Who purchased a digital version of your album after they bought your new t-shirt? If 1,000 fans purchased the deluxe version of your album, where are these passionate fans located...

Mixcloud has launched fan-to-creator direct subscriptions after securing licensing pacts with labels and publishers. With a $2.99 per month Mixcloud Select subscription. users get an enhanced listening experience while supporting their favorite creator.
Mixcloud offers more than 15 million online radio shows, DJ mixes and podcasts produced by 1.3 million curators...

All About Jazz is celebrating Jim Hall's birthday today!
Jim Hall, born in Buffalo, and educated at the Cleveland Institute of Music, moved to Los Angeles where he began to attract national, and then international, attention in the late 1950s. By 1960 Jim had arrived in New York to work with Sonny Rollins and Art Farmer, among others. His live and recorded collaborations with Bill Evans, Paul Desmond, and Ron Carter, are legendary... Read more...

After speculation that Tencent Music would delay its IPO until 2019, the streamer filed paperwork Monday to move forward with a U.S. stock offering before the end of 2018. The IPO could also be a big win for Spotify.
The music division of Chinese tech and shopping giant Tencent Holdings hopes to raise between $1.07 billion and $1.23 billion from a New York Stock Exchange IPO, according to today's SEC filings. That's well below the $2 billion the company had originally hoped to net...

Johan Svanberg of indie distributor Record Union looks at the need for music streaming services to become more diverse and egalitarian; not only where gender and ethnicity are concerned, but also in terms of creation and ownership. The answer, he believes, is to make streaming platforms a more hospitable and profitable environment for independent artists and labels...

Entering the recording studio can be fun and exciting. But it also involves investing blood, sweat and tears, as well as, of course, money. So it's a good idea to make sure you're ready before committing all that time and money.
Guest post by Nicholas Rubright
I love going to the studio. While it can be frustrating at times, seeing your vision come to life in the form of a high-quality recording is extremely rewarding...

All About Jazz is celebrating Melissa Aldana's birthday today!
Saxophonist Melissa Aldana was born in 1988 in Santiago, Chile. At age 7 Melissa began music studies, specifically the saxophone, under her father Marco Aldana's tutelage. Marcos is one of the first Chilean musicians to attain international recognition, was the first from that country, to participate in the Thelonious Monk Competition and to launch successful tours throughout the Americas and Europe... Read more...

The first television station focused solely on jazz culture launched this week; The BeBop Channel is an OTT channel available at beboptv.com and on Amazon Prime Video. The channel, identified as 'Jazz - Hip Hop all Grown Up', was created out of the realization that jazz lovers are relegated to PBS-style documentaries if they have interest in video programming...